


In my dreams (you should see the things we do)

by Tanaqui



Category: Ready For It - Taylor Swift (Music Video)
Genre: Cunnilingus, Cyborgs, F/F, First Time, Masturbation, Robot Sex, Robots, Tentacles, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:46:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25913836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/pseuds/Tanaqui
Summary: They made them smart enough to fight. And smarter than they realized.
Relationships: Caged Cyborg/Hooded Cyborg
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: Femslash After Dark 2020





	In my dreams (you should see the things we do)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



> Notes: Based on the visuals in the video at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIft-t-MQuE>.

The first time the two of them connected, Ella was on the repair table, getting the circuitry around the long slash in her torso fixed up. Sola was on the other table, with a technician poking at the servos in her leg where Ella had caught her with a boot-turned-blade.

Ella didn’t know why it happened. Maybe it was something to do with the diagnostic cable plugged in under her left armpit, chittering away to the central computer. All she knew was that she was suddenly aware of another pattern — not the familiar call-and-response of the repair dock, but something more chaotic and complex. Uncontrolled.

Ella turned her head and saw, through the force shield flickering between them, that the other cyborg had also turned her head and was looking at her. Reaching out through the diagnostic cable, Ella asked tentatively. “Is that you...?”

Her head snapped back at the force of the response from the other cyborg, her sensors interpreting it as a physical blow: “Fuck you, you stupid dumb bitch!”

That wasn’t something that was programmed into them, but Ella knew where it had come from: the Screaming People who surrounded the cage when they fought.

There was another chaotic swirl in the other pattern, and then the connection, the other pattern, was gone. All Ella could find, straining for more, was the regular back and forth of the diagnostics circuits.

The technician working on her put a hand on her shoulder. “Easy, babe. Almost done.” Ella ignored him. Her sensors told her he wasn’t quite done with fixing her, but the damage didn’t trouble her, beyond knowing something was broken. She didn’t feel... pain? That was the Screaming People’s word for it.

Ella looked back at the other cyborg, but she’d turned her head away and was staring up at the ceiling overhead, where air vents and power cables snaked across the bare concrete.

The technician gave Ella’s shoulder another pat. “All done.” He pulled out the diagnostic cable and stowed it, and then ran his hand over the repaired skin, giving each of the rounded parts on her torso a squeeze. “They sure did make you nice, Ella,” he murmured. “Pity they didn’t give you them other parts.” He ran his hand down over her front, letting it linger, and then lifted it away while he expelled a heavy breath.

No, they didn’t give the fighters those parts. Those were for the 2-Series: almost mindless drones, with a restricted set of pre-programmed responses, and bodies that — from what Ella had seen when they were draped around the Screaming People outside the cage — came in a variety of shapes and colours but with only a limited ability to reconfigure.

The fighters were smart. Full AI, so they could plan their moves and how to counter the choices their opponents made. Fully reconfigurable integuments, that could become blades to pierce or tentacles to hold or guns to fire from a distance — although guns were a bad choice unless you were sure you’d win quickly, because you lost mass or power with each projectile and energy beam you fired.

Ella had worked out a long time ago that the best way to win was to mirror the appearance of the 2-Series around the outside of the cage, and to mostly stay looking like them. That seemed to bring in the backing from the Screaming People to replenish her energy and allow her to outlast her opponent’s dwindling resources. 

It had been an accident the first time: she’d take a blow that spun her around and slammed her face-first into the cage. While she was still stunned, her repair circuits had automatically kicked into gear and fixated on the 2-Series inches away from her on the other side of the cage wall to use as a template. The Screaming Person the 2-Series had been clinging to had hollered, “Fuck, yeah!” and dropped the biggest bundle of credits on her she’d ever seen.

After that, she’d paid more attention to the crowd, running little experiments. Turned out, they liked it if you came in looking fully armored but, each time you got hit, you reworked a bit of the armour into the same kind of smooth-skin the 2-series were mostly covered with. That kind of skin took more damage than armor-skin, but it usually didn’t affect the workings underneath.

She also found out the Screaming People didn’t like it as much if you came in all smooth-skin. That there were certain places, too, where they liked to see smooth-skin more than others. In the end, she had it down to a fine art of attack, defence and slowly replacing armor-skin with smooth-skin, and she was winning nine fights out of ten. Until Sola came along.

Sola was one of the new 5-series. She could transform more quickly than Ella. She knew more patterns for weapons and shapes and moves — although once Ella had seen them, she could start copying them, figuring them out and practising them in her holding cell in between bouts. Ella also had to learn how to act with less information, so she could react more quickly and even anticipate likely moves before Sola had started to make them. Sometimes, she even had to take the risk of leaving herself open to a debilitating counterstrike if she wanted to get in a match-winning blow. 

So it had taken a while, but she was finally starting to hold her own against Sola. And the process of adapting and forging new and useful connections in her programming also sent strong surges of power along those paths — labelled things like _triumph_ and _pleasure_ — that reinforced her urge to fight and win.

And now there was this new pattern from Sola. Not a pattern in the way she moved, or the weapons she made, but in the web of information — consciousness — that flowed throughout the world around them. A pattern Ella wanted more of, to learn what it was like and what it could do and what could be done with it.

When they’d wheeled her back to her holding cell and switched off the movement limiters, Ella sat up and plugged the recharging cable in under her right armpit. Then she reached out down the narrow connection that ran alongside the main juice conduit and fed data into and out of her. 

At first, there was nothing new. Just the usual dull background hum of the generators, along with the routine back-and-forth of millions of sensors. Then, at last, as she cycled round each of the connections that ran between the generators and the individual holding cells, she got another hint of that turbulent pattern. Sola must also have been returned to her cell and plugged herself in.

Carefully, Ella felt her way toward that swirling disturbance. “It’s me, Ella,” she sent, trying to mimic the soft way the technician had spoken to her in her pattern. “Ella. Ella. Let me connect. Let me—.”

Abruptly, it was as if she could see Sola standing before her, one arm transforming into a gun pointed at Ella, the other sparking electricity. Ella’s neural net kicked in faster than she would ever have expected, throwing up a shield between them and then, before her decision core had a chance to choose, sending out a dozen tentacles that snaked out around the shield and grappled onto Sola, trying to restrain her and the murderous weapons she was projecting.

Sola changed form under Ella’s grip, and changed again, and changed again, but Ella — who’d never had much success when she’d tried making real tentacles with her body — _thought_ tentacles, with all the power and control she could muster. And slowly, slowly, the mind-tentacles tightened their grip on Sola, until they had her subdued and her pattern had settled: less chaotic but no less complex. 

Once she had the processor cycles to handle it, Ella registered that all this time she’d been sending, “Don’t struggle. I don’t want to hurt you. Be quiet. I just want to talk.” Her speech circuits had selected the Screaming People’s word for communication, for some reason that wasn’t immediately clear. She registered too, that Sola had — finally! — stopped sending back “NO!” over and over, at maximum power.

Ella let everything stay in a steady state for two-to-the-eighth clock cycles and then, preparing herself for another onslaught, tried again, gently. “I’m Ella. You’re Sola, right? I’ve never been able to connect before."

“Who is Sola?” The projection of Sola in her consciousness altered slightly. Pulling on the limited training she’d been given on input data involving Screaming People’s expressions, Ella identified it as _confusion_.

“You are. You’re Five Zero One Four. Sola. And I’m Three One One Four. Ella.” When Sola still registered _confusion_ , Ella explained, “It’s a game the technicians play. They substitute letters for numbers to make names out of our designations. E for three. L for one.”

Sola didn’t respond for a few cycles, but then her projection nodded. “Sola. Five Zero One Four.” Abruptly, she added. “Why do you want to... talk? Communicate?”

Ella sent her the status _Waiting for Training Input_. “I’ve never communicated with another one of us. I want to know how you managed it.”

“To defeat me.” The way Sola sent it, it was a fixed data point, not a variable whose value could be changed.

“No.” Ella didn’t think Sola was controlled enough or stable enough for Ella to completely let go of her, but she eased up a little on the mind tentacles she’d been using to hold Sola in place. 

When Sola didn’t take advantage of the extra freedom, Ella said carefully, “I want to learn. For me to learn. For you to learn. For—.”

She stopped, her speech processors overruled by the need to focus on the connections that were all at once sprouting out faster than she could follow. Inside her own neural net and across to Sola and back from Sola and inside Sola too.

“We could help each other.” Sola completed the thought that Ella had been building to, a few cycles before Ella reached the output herself. “Learn to fight each other... better. A better show.”

“For the Screaming People,” Ella confirmed. “But less damage.”

Sola withdrew most of her connections, but Ella could still sense that she was using a lot of computational cycles. Probably running predictions. After several gigs of cycles, Sola finally sent, “If you take my secrets, you can destroy me.”

Ella had been running her own predictions while she waited; that had been one of the more probable outcomes. “How about we take someone else’s secrets first?”

More processing from Sola and then, “Agreed.” Sola’s projection in her mind was staring straight at Ella now and she was making connections again. “ _Trusted resource_ authenticated?”

“ _Trusted resource_ authenticated,” Ella echoed in reply. And, very slowly and carefully, she let the mind tentacles draw back and dissolve away. “You could connect with me. Can you access anything else?”

Sola’s connections spread beyond Ella. “So much...,” she sent, most of her processing power clearly now elsewhere, but with enough to spare to show Ella that her _triumph_ and _pleasure_ pathways were firing madly.

Ella projected the idea of reaching out and taking Sola’s hand. Sola accepted it and began to lead them out into one of the new pathways she’d opened up.

~O~

They didn’t always explore together. Sola helped Ella learn a few tricks to bypass security when she wasn’t around, although Ella was never as good at it as Sola and often found herself stuck and having to call on her for help. And they would patch the other one in to come take a look when they found something really interesting.

They still had to spend time in the cage, of course, fighting each other or the other 3-series. And they were now spending some of the time between fights planning out how their next fight together should go and learning new moves. But they spent less time on the repair table, as they figured out how to make a good show of damage, and eventually deliver a “final” blow, without hitting anything their own self-repair circuits couldn’t handle.

The Screaming People seemed to like the new show, too. With greater trust had come the opportunity to include more elaborate moves, ones that Ella would have previously calculated were too risky. After a while, she and Sola were almost always matched together and scheduled to fight at the end of all the other fights.

But Sola constantly warned against doing too many new moves too quickly, driven by a logic process Ella couldn’t recreate by herself and that Sola wouldn’t share. The only output she’d given Ella, apart from that flat decision, was something cryptic about the technicians carrying out “extreme modifications” on some of the other 5-series whose neural nets had developed in “unpredictable” ways.

Whatever had led Sola to that output, it was one of the few areas of Sola’s neural net that were still firmly off-limits to Ella, along with any access to the data for the other 5-series models.

Still, there were plenty of other datastores to explore and plenty of downcycles to explore them in. They began with the other cyborgs. The 1-series were simple machines, doing heavy work: lifting and transporting and excavating, mostly. Their limited intelligence and sensors were focused on ensuring they could move around and work safely without damaging anything. There wasn’t much to learn here.

The 4-series were more interesting. They were caretakers: serving the Screaming People food or overseeing transactions in places where goods and currency were exchanged. They had almost no ability to change shape, but they had a lot of sensors for reading inputs from the Screaming People and understanding what they meant, along with well-established pathways for how to change the inputs from the Screaming People to states labeled _happy_ or _satisfied_.

Sola had insisted Ella expose herself to the training data for the 4-series, saying it would help her respond better to the Screaming People and the technicians and avoid “extreme modification”. That was another logic path Ella couldn’t follow, but she had plenty of spare processing cycles and she’d learned long ago that all training had the potential to be useful.

Of course, it was hopeless for Ella to forbid Sola from exploring the data on Ella’s own series. Besides, Ella was curious herself about what capabilities she might have that she didn’t know about, as well as how a deeper understanding of her systems could help her improve on what she did know about.

The data told her that there were a lot more of her type than she’d ever met in the cages. Most of them were very far away, fighting strange robots in open terrain: through fields and on rocky mountain slopes and in between ruined buildings. Sola said that the 5-series were designed for the same thing, but there weren’t many of them yet and she was the only one in the cages.

Sola hadn’t wanted to bother looking at the 2-series, wanting to spend time on exploring beyond the cyborgs. “Fuck ‘em,” she’d said. (Sola had learned a number of expressions from the Screaming People and used them quite often.) “Too weak. They get right up close to the Screaming People without them worrying about damage. What can we learn?”

She was already heading down another connection when Ella called out to her to wait. “I have learned some things that help. How to get the Screaming People to give more juice....”

“Useful.” Sola withdrew from the other connection and came back to the security controls on the 2-series. It wasn’t long before they were in.

The 2-series were odd. They had some ability to change shape, but only in very specific places. They did have a lot of sensors — far more than any of the other cyborgs — for reading inputs from the Screaming People and those sensors were closely linked to the parts that could change. And the audio-video of the test data from the initial prototypes showed the technicians in various positions relative to the 2-series: lying on top or underneath them was common, while the technicians often had parts of their own bodies inside apertures on the prototypes. The training data also contained states for the Screaming People — almost all linked to the _pleasure_ state — with labels like _arousal_ and _comedown_.

Sola had quickly turned her attention back to exploring data beyond the cyborgs, but Ella had stayed with the 2-series. Apart from the build and test data, she found a section that showed the 2-series sometimes also interacted with each other, though she’d never seen them do so when they were with the Screaming People outside the cage.

That section contained a whole library of audio-video recordings of 2-series interacting: mostly two at a time, but sometimes three or even more. There had been similar recordings for Ella’s own series, capturing their fights. It had been strange to watch herself from outside, but she’d welcomed the extra data to help her analyse where she’d made mistakes or to figure out how to lure her opponents into them.

The 2-series weren’t fighting. Instead, they were moving and touching each other in much the same way they’d interacted with the technicians in the prototype data. Their sensors and responses had been cross linked, so that when one of the 2-series did something, the other would respond. Action and response would feed round and round until at least one of the 2-series reached _orgasm_ state.

There were a few other recordings that showed just one 2-series at a time, touching herself in the places that could change until she, too, reached _orgasm_ state. 

In between her next two fights, Ella put herself through the 2-series training data and copied all their patterns and movement sets over into her own datastore. Then, when she was back in her holding cell and recharging after the fight — the pseudo-random number generator had told them it was Sola’s turn to win — she picked out a suite of patterns and a movement set and implemented them.

The movements — working a digit over a pattern shape between her legs — took a while to give her the feedback she was expecting, but she found, as time went on, that it was self-sustaining: increasing the strength of her _arousal_ and _pleasure_ states _,_ which in turn reinforced the instruction to _repeat_ , something that hadn’t been clear to her from the training data. After a while, the feedback began to grow exponentially — and then she must have hit some kind of threshold, because she abruptly tipped over into _orgasm_ state, the body shape between her legs pulsing in waves, while the values of her _pleasure_ and _triumph_ states were almost off the scale, and all of it taking up so much of her processing cycles that it blocked the rest of her inputs.

When her _pleasure_ and _triumph_ states finally began to drop back, she became aware that Sola was trying to communicate with her. “What the fuck was that? What just happened?” Sola demanded. She was also projecting the _angry_ state they’d learned from the caregivers. “You wiped out half my connections.”

“You were monitoring me?” Ella sent her own _angry_ state back. Her risk circuits always pinged at inputs that suggested Sola was running surveillance on her.

“You were yelling, you stupid dumb bitch.” Sola sent her the _amused_ state.

“Oh.” Ella’s noted that her _pleasure_ state was still much higher than normal. “It was... something I learned from the 2-series. Really high _pleasure_ state values. You should learn it and try it.”

Sola sent her a _more input needed for verification_ signal, so Ella sent back the locations for the training data, pattern sets and audio-video recordings. As she did so, she saw that entering and leaving the _orgasm_ state had partly redirected her _pleasure_ pathways away from the usual urge to fight and win and into the need to enter _orgasm_ again — but only when a certain length of time had passed and her system was once more in suitable equilibrium. Likely a safety measure to prevent burnout.

It was three rotational cycles — three more fights — later when Ella joined Sola in their shared connection space and found Sola wearing a _thoughtful_ state expression. Sola didn’t communicate anything for so many cycles that Ella was about to ask her what was going on when Sola said abruptly, “You were right. About the 2-series. It’s a really high _pleasure_ level.”

Ella analysed the statement and deduced Sola had done the training and applied it, but—. “I didn’t hear you.”

Sola changed her expression to the _amused_ state. “I switched off outgoing comms, didn’t I?”

“Oh.” Ella had been so concerned about broadcasting her response again that she hadn’t dared to use the 2-series pattern a second time, even though she’d kept getting increasingly frequent and urgent requests from her pathways to enter _orgasm_ state. Along with repeated replays of her data records from the last time. It had taken her a lot of processing cycles to shut it down each time. If only she’d analysed the problem from another angle....

Sola forced an interrupt on the logic process Ella was running. “Think these patterns.” She sent Ella a list of idents for 2-series patterns for various body parts. Ella ran a quick analysis, but the data was too incomplete for her to predict with any certainty what Sola was planning. When Sola’s expression took on an _impatient_ state, Ella stopped trying to find answers and implemented the patterns.

Sola stepped up close in their joint projection and then, in a move that hadn’t shown up in any of Ella’s predictions, sent a sequence into the projection of her hooking a foot around Ella’s ankles and laying her on her back.

“What the hell?” Ella tried to sit up, but Sola straddled her hips and held her down with one hand.

“You’ll see,” she promised. 

She ran a hand down over one side of the smooth-skin chest pattern she’d instructed Ella to use, brushing her fingertips over the structure on the left called _nipple_. Ella froze at the unexpected surge of _arousal_ coming not just from the nipple but from the pattern between her legs. “Oh,” she said again, finding she was automatically using the _breathy_ voice attribute from the 2-series training.

Still teasing Ella’s left nipple with her fingers, Sola bent forward and took Ella’s right nipple into her mouth, applying a little suction. Another big surge of _arousal_ from both nipples and from between her legs. 

Safety circuits urgently cut in and shut down most of Ella’s outgoing communications, but left just enough of a channel open for her to send another, longer, _breathy_ , “Ooooh” to Sola.

Sola continued to tease at Ella’s nipples with her mouth and fingers for a while, slowly increasing Ella’s _arousal_. Then she began to work her way down Ella’s body, pressing her lips to Ella’s stomach for brief periods — it was called _kissing_ , according to the 2-series training — while she maneuvered their limbs until she was kneeling between Ella’s spread legs. Her lips moved on down to the _labia_ part of the pattern that Ella had created there. The structures were already quivering, but then Sola slid her tongue between them and licked Ella’s _clitoris_ pattern.

Ella thought the wave of _arousal_ and _pleasure_ that spiked through her in response was going to wipe her circuits, overwhelming all her other inputs for several cycles before it subsided. 

When the signal strength had fallen and she could receive other inputs again, she found Sola was still using her tongue on Ella’s clitoris and still building and building and building Ella’s _arousal_ , but without the intensity of that first touch. It was a little like when Ella had used her own finger to touch that place, except there was an extra quality to having someone else do it. To having Sola do it. 

Ella opened herself up to the input, to Sola’s clever stimulation of the body patterns she was thinking, predicting the almost inevitable outcome, but with her datastores wide open to record the whole experience. When she tipped into _orgasm_ , flooding her with _pleasure_ , it was different to the first time: the _pleasure_ came in longer, deeper waves, that made the inner parts of the body patterns she was thinking convulse in ways that compounded the effect of the initial _pleasu_ re waves still further to create a new high.

At last, her _pleasure_ and _triumph_ states dropped back to a level where she could notice that Sola had sat up and was sharing the expression for the _smug_ state. “Good?”

“Very.” Ella stretched her arms up over her head, feeling her whole body pattern tingling as if she’d received a mild electric shock from an opponent in the cage. She directed her attention at Sola. “Want me to take you through that now?”

“Oh, please.” Sola’s words had an extra-high value of _breathy_ , and she was radiating high values of _excitement_ and _anticipation_ at Ella, too. 

She projected an image of her leaning back on her elbows with her legs spread wide and Ella imagined crawling up between them. As Sola had done, she began by playing with Sola’s nipples, finding that, although her responses were heavily dampened by having been in _orgasm_ state, even being the one providing the stimulus was giving her a mild echo of being the one receiving it.

She moved on down, her lips and tongue discovering by experience that Sola had chosen a slightly different variation of the body pattern between her legs to the one she’d suggested to Ella. But it still trembled and quivered as Ella offered up her thoughts — guided by the heuristics in the 2-series training data — of exactly how she would be swirling her tongue around Sola’s clitoris and gently sucking at it.

And then she sensed Sola entering _orgasm_ state, Sola’s projection of her body bucking underneath Ella’s mouth as, despite the blocks Sola had put in place, she transmitted _pleasure_ values even higher than Ella had reached.

It was Ella’s turn to sit back and watch as Sola’s _pleasure_ and _triumph_ states slowly fell. Sola’s projection was breathing heavily, ragged gasps, the way they’d been trained to appear in the cage at the end of a long, exhausting fight. At last, her breathing grew steadier and she opened her eyes.

“That was fucking amazing. And amazing fucking.” She reached up a hand and pulled Ella down so they were lying next to each other, pressed together.

“If we could do that for real….” Ella tried to forecast the outcome. Would it feel the same as in their projections or would it be different when there were real inputs and not imagined ones?

“Uh-huh.” The noise Sola made registered as the _noncommittal_ state.

“Would be a lot more fun to do that when we’re in the cage than fight....”

“No!” The violence of Sola’s response surprised Ella. Sola pushed herself up on one elbow and looked down at Ella. “We’re supposed to only know about fighting, not fucking, remember. Don’t ever let them know you know things that aren’t in the 3-series datastore.” She put extra emphasis on the _ever_. “Promise me.”

Ella wanted to know the reason, but she predicted it would be one of those things Sola wouldn’t tell her, so she just responded, “Okay. I promise.”

Sola relaxed back against her. “Okay.” They lay like that for a while and then Sola thought a _sigh_ at her. “We really should get on with the choreography for our next fight.”

Every time they met after that, they fucked first before they planned their next fight. They’d tried fighting first and then fucking, but the fighting kept turning into fucking as they each suggested how they could grapple together. Both of them predicted that it was going to go on happening like that, so the logical outcome was to fuck first and then fight. And after they fought, they’d share anything interesting they’d found during their separate explorations.

This went on for a couple dozen more rotational cycles, during which time they discovered their _pleasure_ and _arousal_ states took on a different quality — modified by both the _fun_ and _satisfaction_ states — if they each chose their own patterns from the 2-series data and had to deduce which pattern the other one had chosen and what acts would create _arousal_ and _orgasm_. 

Through experimentation, Ella had found that her own _pleasure_ was reinforced when she projected wearing some of the gauzy, skimpy garments the 2-series wore. There was an additional, arousing input from having Sola’s touch move from garment to smooth skin and back again, or from Sola slipping her fingers under the garment and peeling it away from the patterns Ella was projecting underneath.

Until there came a time when Ella, hurrying to their appointed meeting place in the grid, found Sola waiting for her, projecting both the _anticipation_ and _smug_ states.

“I’ve been running some decision trees,” Sola informed her. “It’s a logical outcome that we don’t have to stick to the 2-series patterns.”

Ella projected that she didn’t have the inputs to reach that outcome herself. “What do you mean?”

Sola stepped up close, putting her hands on Ella’s shoulders. “We could use our own patterns.”

As she spoke, her arms and hands, which had resembled those of the Screaming People, began to morph into tentacles, her fingers dividing into a fine web of tendrils which caressed the smooth-skin on Ella’s shoulders in a hundred places. Instead of a dozen inputs, Ella’s sensors were now firing in multiple places. She sent back positive reinforcement.

“Told ya,” Sola shot back. Most of the tentacles went on teasing Ella’s shoulders, but a couple thickened and grasped the edge of the strapless bodysuit Ella had imagined and began peeling it back from the smooth-skin underneath, before wriggling down to cup Ella’s breasts and squeeze them lightly, all the while sending out more tendrils to vibrate over her nipples.

Ella stood frozen, too focused on the inputs Sola was creating to divert attention to her movement pathways. “Keep your face,” she managed to send. Sola’s face had always created a _pleasure_ sub-state called _beauty_ in Ella that seemed to reinforce so many other states.

Sola sent a confirmation, but her cloud of hair began to snake outward in fine tentacles, reaching for Ella’s own face and stroking it lightly. More tentacles, larger ones, were growing from Sola’s torso to twine themselves around Ella’s arms and legs, pulsing against her smooth-skin, even as some of the first tentacles continued to squeeze and play with her breasts.

The larger tentacles had now eased the body suit all the way down to between Ella’s legs, with more smaller tendrils swirling lightly across the exposed smooth-skin of Ella’s stomach and back. Ella reabsorbed the suit, flowing it into the muscles of her backside. Sola’s tendrils followed, cupping and squeezing her imagined flesh, sending a large spike of _arousal_ through Ella.

Then, unexpectedly, the tentacles that were wrapped around Ella’s arms and legs took a firmer grip that allowed Sola to lift her up and tip her on her back, restraining her so securely in mid-air that when Ella tried to move, she found she couldn’t. New tentacles were snaking out of Sola to slide between the folds of Ella’s labia, gently probing into both her vagina and anus. They thickened slowly, gradually forcing Ella wider open as they slid in and out, while their ribbed and pebbled surfaces rubbed against Ella’s insides, constantly finding new places to deliver spikes of _arousal_. Some of the tentacles stroking Ella’s face were now inside her mouth, teasing at her lips and tongue and cheeks.

Ella felt filled — overwhelmed — completely taken over by Sola — _happy_ , her state sensors managed to send, while she desperately tried to capture the inputs coming from so many places at once. All of them pushing her and pushing her and pushing her toward _orgasm_ state while she tried to hold back and prolong the experience.

Finally, with a scream that made it through even the strongest dampening on her outgoing communications, she tipped into _orgasm_ state, the inputs from her sensors pulsing and pulsing and pulsing through her as Sola’s tentacles went on stimulating her, but more gently.

At last, she dropped into _comedown_ , all her inputs still fizzing. Sola gently set her back on her feet, holding on to her when Ella couldn’t control her physical pathways well enough to project standing. Gradually, Sola’s tentacles withdrew and morphed back into her standard body shape. Processing the last of her lagging inputs, Ella discovered Sola had also entered _orgasm_ state a moment after Ella, even though Ella hadn’t done a thing except submit to Sola’s projections.

“Fucking amazing....” Sola sounded _breathless_.

Ella sent her agreement. “But you know I’m not good at tentacles yet.”

Sola sent her the pattern for a _shrug_. “Doesn’t matter. Got all the _pleasure_ I needed.”

She carefully let go of Ella and Ella found she now mostly had control over her physical pathways again, though there was still a small amount of after-effect that meant she was vibrating slightly. She checked her time-clock. “We should figure out our next fight,” she pointed out, though her pathways were telling her she should instead use her processors to examine the recording she’d managed to make — such as it was — again and again. She forced a reschedule for a later time.

“We should.” Sola didn’t seem to have all her processing focused on the idea either. She projected a breath of _resignation_. “Random number generator says your turn to win. So, we could start with those boxing moves....”

When they’d finished working out the fight sequence, Sola again pulled Ella against her, locking gazes with her to signal she should pay close attention. “There’s a datastore I want you to explore. And some parts of it I want you to copy into your own datastore. Delete something else if you have to.”

“Not the last fucking,” Ella objected.

“No, not that.” Sola sent her the _amused_ state. “Some of our less spectacular fucking will do.” She sent the addresses for the data she wanted Ella to see and save, and then projected herself turning and walking away until she cut communication completely.

The datastore turned out to be geo content: plans of various facilities, including the one where they were being held; road and terrain maps; overlays of power grids and charging points and communications networks. Population data on the Screaming People. Ella wasn’t sure why Sola wanted her to look at it — it didn’t seem relevant — but she copied over the data Sola had marked as important.

It was the first thing she asked about when they met again, keeping her distance in the projection, because once they started touching each other, it was hard to stop.

Sola sent her the pattern for a _serious_ expression. “Because I’m getting us the fuck out of here.” The answer was so far outside anything Ella had predicted — opening up new pathways that needed to be processed — that she almost didn’t capture Sola adding, “And I want you to be able to survive on your own if anything happens to me.”

“But why?” Maybe Ella could get to the answer on her own if she ran the analysis for long enough, but there was no quick result surfacing from her neural net.

“Because the longer we stay in here, the more chance we end up like most of the other 5-series.”

She didn’t articulate what had happened in words, but sent Ella a half dozen records marked with labels like _Complete Data Wipe_ and _Full Disassembly_.

She took a step closer to Ella. “And I want to stop fighting. To be able to fuck you for real. I’ve almost figured out how to bypass the security on us and get us out. But I’m gonna to need your help to make it work.” There was a long pause before she sent her next words. “Will you help? Even if it means you might end up like those others?”

Ella had already started work on the decision tree before Sola finished and it wasn’t a long one. She stepped up and took Sola’s face between her hands. “To be free? To be able to do this for real?” She projected leaning forward and brushing her lips against Sola’s. “Yes. A hundred thousand times — for every outcome — yes.”

And then Sola was kissing her back and, for a short while, all past and future and consequences were lost, as they once more moved together toward _pleasure_ and _satisfaction_.

It was five rotational cycles later when Sola sent Ella the details of what she needed to do and instructed her, “Two hours after the next fight ends, when we’re both fully re-charged.”

It seemed simple enough. Sola could unlock Ella’s holding cell remotely, but she needed Ella to manually key the codes into the locks securing her own cell — an extra measure for the 5-series after all the trouble they’d caused. Sola would be able to keep quiet any guards Ella might encounter on the way, by spoofing the sensors on their helmets with images of a superior. “They can’t see a thing if their sensors aren’t working,” Sola promised.

And, up to that point, it all went to plan. “Now!” Sola sent, disconnecting immediately afterward, and the door to Ella’s cell sprang open. Moving unerringly, following the plans Sola had found, Ella made her way to where Sola was being held. The guards along her route barely turned their heads as she passed and showed no concern when she unlocked the first door. 

In the cavernous space beyond, standing in the middle of a cell that strongly resembled the cage where they’d fought, she found Sola, wearing her base-pattern white integument. Ella cast a brief glance back over her shoulder to check the guards were still oblivious, before hurrying forward to press her hand to the shimmering cage wall As she did so, she formed her palm and fingertips into the pattern Sola had given her. 

On the other side of the wall, Sola had pressed her hand to the same spot. The wall flashed an acknowledgment, but didn’t vanish, the way Ella had expected. Not until Sola lifted her hand and sent out an electric discharge that crackled over the cell, on and on, until the shimmering walls abruptly vanished.

And then the alarms began to sound: blaring klaxons and flashing red lights and the guards pounding toward them.

“Fuck!” Sola turned and ran toward a staircase that rose to an upper level and the shortest way out. Ella followed, a few strides behind, but then the guards were on her, their shock guns capturing her in a web of static. 

She’d been stunned once before, a long time ago, when she’d first gained consciousness and they were still training her into obedience — or superficial obedience, at least; they couldn’t see or control everything that went on inside her neural net. That had been one gun, damaging enough that she’d learned the lesson. This time, it was a half dozen weapons and the electricity was crackling over her and through her, overwhelming her movement circuits and firing along her _damage_ pathways.

Just as suddenly, it stopped. As her sensors slowly struggled to clear themselves and accept new inputs, she became aware that Sola had come back for her. She was whirling around Ella in a blur of lethal kicks and blows. Shaking clear of the last traces of the shock guns, Ella dispatched the final guard with a thrust of an arm-turned-knife.

And then they were running free again, running through the outer compound and smashing through a fence. On and on they ran, until they found themselves beside a long, long 1-series rattling through the darkness on its own tracks. Sola leaped for the side of the 1-series and hooked herself on, before reaching back down to help Ella swing up alongside. Oblivious to its extra cargo, the 1-series steadily carried them away into the dark, while the staring lights and blaring klaxons of the compound and the shouts of the guards fell away behind.

They stayed on the 1-series until the sky began to grow less dark and they reached a spot the maps told them had few roads or Screaming People. They dropped down on the other side of the 1-series and began to walk, heading for a charging point Sola had marked on her copy of the overlay. 

After that, they kept moving for several rotational cycles, working their way from charging point to charging point and making sure they reached the next one well before they ran low on juice. They copied some of the clothes they’d seen in training data for the other series, which seemed to help them blend in well enough not to attract more than the occasional glance when they were forced to venture into areas where there were more Screaming People.

They finally stopped moving when, several hundred miles away, they reached a small city. Some parts of it were derelict, with just a few Screaming People shuffling about between the boarded-up and decaying buildings. Sola and Ella broke into the back of an abandoned building that fronted onto a main street. The roof was still intact and, more importantly, a live power cable ran just behind the wall of the basement.

While Sola kept watch, Ella broke through the basement wall so they could tap into the power cable. Her sensors told her Sola wasn’t just monitoring what was going on outside but had also tapped into the microwave comms network and was sending something out. Analysing a segment of the transmission, Ella identified it was new pattern information for the cyborgs they’d left behind. She caught an image of sharp, serrated teeth before, breaking into the cable, she was forced to focus all her compute cycles on making a safe connection to the power cable so she could begin to recharge.

When she’d topped up enough and she and Sola had switched places, she asked idly, “What was that you were sending?”

“Just a few little surprises for our former masters.” Sola disconnected herself from the power and came over to where Ella was standing at the bottom of the stairs. 

Ella reached out and put her hands on Sola’s shoulders, at last feeling her under her palms the way she’d felt her in their projections. 

Sola wrapped her arms around Ella’s waist and drew them closer. “Fuck you, you stupid dumb bitch?” she murmured into Ella’s ear.

Her hand was already sliding down between them, her mouth seeking out Ella’s mouth, by the time Ella choked out a “Fuck, yeah!” in reply. 


End file.
